Below is an overview of what I’ve been working on this past week.
[1.] I put a Markdown file together for our VCU collaborators updating them as to what all we’ve been doing on the data + code side of things this last month. It includes a breakdown of our cleaning and analysis process, tables containing by-court summaries of evictions across the years of data we have, maps displaying by-ZIP numbers, and an appendix with code for the curious.
[2.] One of my aims with the code for this project has been to keep things as automated as possible: At some point, someone else may well want to use these scripts—and potentially with different/new data. To that end, I prepared a “control” script that sequentially runs all of the other code involved in cleaning and analyzing the data. The scripts can, if desired, all be run separately—there may well be times when someone wants to deal with just one section of code or generate just one small chunk of output—but there’s now the smooth-sailing option to run everything and generate all of the output files completely hands off.
That is, we begin with the following directory state. (The oddly named folders each contain a year’s worth of district or circuit eviction data in the form of several “child” CSVs.)
We then run “RUN-ALL.R”—the “control” script—and we automatically end up with the following: